(Analysis by Jonathan Paulson - [email protected])

If a faster cow is behind a slower cow, the faster cow is eventually going to catch up and join the slower cow's group (or join a group in the middle).

So we want to count the number of cows who have no slower cows ahead of them; this is the number of cows who won't join another group (and hence will start their own group).

The most obvious way to to go through each cow and check if any of the cows ahead of them are faster. But this is too slow: there are about $N^2$ pairs of cows, and N = $10^5$. So $N^2$ is about $10^{10}$, and computers only do about $10^9$ operations per second (which usually translates to about $10^7$ iterations of a simple loop in one second of time).

Luckily, there is a faster way: start from the back, and keep track of the slowest cow as you go. This only takes about $N$ operations, which is very fast.

Here is my C++ code for the fast approach:

#include <cstdio>
#include <vector>

using namespace std;

typedef long long ll;

int main() {
  ll n;
  scanf("%lld", &n);
  vector<ll> S;
  for(ll i=0; i<n; i++) {
    ll x, s;
    scanf("%lld %lld\n", &x, &s);
    S.push_back(s);
  }

  ll ans = 1;
  ll slow = S[n-1];
  for(ll i=n-2; i>=0; i--) {
    if(S[i] > slow) {
      // cows group up
    } else {
      ans++;
    }
    slow = min(slow, S[i]);
  }
  printf("%lld\n", ans);
}